Ctrl+Alt+Defy, the white-hat hacker rewriting the cybersecurity rulebook

Articulate, confident, outgoing, a fan of fresh air. Betta Lyon Delsordo is everything the stereotype of a hacker isn’t. Far from spending her days in a dimly lit basement, scamming grannies out of their pension money or searching for a back door into Nasa’s computer system, the 25-year-old from small town Montanaturns up every day to her legit nine-to-five job with a smile on her face and a desire to do some good in the world.

The difference is that, unlike the criminal side of the industry that most often grabs headlines, Delsordo is an ‘ethical hacker’. The term describes the keyboard whizzes who are paid to defend organisations (her employer is literally called OnDefend) from cyber-attacks.

“Basically, people hire me to hack them,” she says. “I break into their systems, then I teach them how to protect themselves.”

With global cybercrime now costing trillions of pounds every year, the list of worried clients queuing for her expertise is long. In her short career, Delsordo has already hacked into the IT systems of a wide range of companies, from social media platforms to regional banks.

Delsordo’s particular specialism is artificial intelligence (AI). For a criminally minded hacker, cheating an AI-powered chat bot to issue a discount sales voucher is child’s play, she notes.The same with deleting someone else’s online account or stealing their personal data.

Yet, while hacking – and AI-empowered hacking in particular – is a “fast-evolving” feld, she’s confident that she can keep toe-to-toe with the attackers. It’s a conviction born from years of formal training (she holds a master’s in cybersecurity from Georgia Institute of Technology) as well as experimenting in her own time.

So, has she ever stepped over to the dark side? Delsordo insists not, but she admits that lines in the hacking world sometimes blur. Take so-called ‘hacktivists’, for example. Also known as ‘greyhackers’, this group of cyber activists sit between the extremes of ethical and malicious hacking, using their skills not to make money primarily but to make a political point.

She gives the example of ticket reselling websites, which scoop up hundreds of tickets and then hawk them to real fans with a huge mark-up. For a young Swifty, say, the practice can mean they miss out on seeing their hero live, she notes: “So, sometimes people will hack the websites of the resellers and give the tickets out to girls who want to go to her [Taylor Swift’s] concerts.”

Delsordo won’t be drawn on whether she agrees with such tactics, stressing instead that her profession as an ethical hacker requires her to remain whiter than white. To get caught doing anything unethical, let alone illegal, she points out: “It would end my career.”

Given how hard she has had to work to get afoot in the door, her desire not to jeopardise her job makes plenty of sense. Ever since the age of 13, when she first started learning to code via YouTube videos, she has had to fight against the pervasive ‘tech is for boys’ belief. She was one of the few girls in the high school technology classes, and says she had an extreme misogynist as a tutor at college. (He was eventually forced to resign after a string of chauvinistic blog posts came to light.)

Technology is power – it’s money, it’s influence – things that women in most societies lack

Even her own parents weren’t 100% convinced about her decision. Growing up, Delsordo and her two sisters (she is a triplet) weren’t allowed smartphones until they were in their late teens. The only way to get online was via “an old PC” that the whole family shared and that her parents monitored closely.

The breakthrough for Delsordo came after she won an iPad Touch in a competition during middle school. “That was my first device, really,” she recalls. “It was really, really locked down, so I would experiment with hacking it … I found some interesting little bugs, ways that I could get around stuff and access YouTube.”

Her interest in all things tech was further piqued aged 15, when she participated in an initiative to teach young girls the basics of programming. The Technovation challenge encourages girls to form teams to design apps that support issues that they care about. Delsordo and her friends decided to make an app that would help direct people to mental health support services. In Montana, there’s “basically no access” to therapists or psychologists in many rural areas, she explains. So, the app was geared towards offering some pointers to those in need.

While the coding part was fun, she recalls, the biggest benefit was the world that the competition opened up to her: “For me, it was really about having access to a mentor, a woman in technology, and learning how to build something and kind of follow through with an idea.”

By the end of high school, her parents realised not only that there was no stopping her, but that she was “actually getting pretty good at technology”. Others have also been quick to spot her talent. She was recently asked to speak not once but twice at the Def Con conference in LasVegas, for instance – the largest industry get-together for IT developers in the world.

Now, Delsordo wants to help other girls like her follow in her footsteps. To that end, she now mentors girls participating in the same Technovation challenge that she once competed in. She also uses her various social media channels to point girls to free online resources where they can learn to code. (Her top tips? Scratch and TryHackMe are good for the “basic stuff ”.)

Her passion to teach others is rooted in a fierce belief that a career in tech can change women’s lives. As she observes: “Technology is power right now – it’s money, it’s influence. Those are all things that women in most societies lack.”

But what does she say to girls who worry they won’t fit in? First off, she doesn’t pretend it will be easy. In the US, men in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) jobs still outnumber women two to one (in the UK, the ratio is closer to three to one). Getting hired can also be tough: two-thirds of US recruiters admit gender bias in the selection stage according to Women in Tech stats from 2024.

Being an ethical hacker is a really amazing career because you get to help people

Yet, her overriding message is: a) building a tech career is more than possible, as her own story proves, and b) it’s simply “not true” that tech workers all need to conform to a particular profile.

There’s a widespread conception that to build a career in cyber security, for example, you have to thrive on “ignoring the rules” and “breaking things” – male tropes, in other words, she says.“They’re like: ‘You can only be a hacker if you think like this’ … and a lot of girls say: ‘Oh, well, I don’t really do that. That’s not me.I’m not a hacker.’ And I want to discourage all of that.”

Ethical hacking can also be fun, she’s keen to stress. Making a pop-up that says “You’ve been hacked” puts a smile on her face. There’s also pleasure from being given a puzzle and tinkering around until she solves it, which is essentially what outsmarting the hackers involves.

“Being an ethical hacker is a really amazing career because you get to help people,” she enthuses. “And it’s also really cool because, you know, what’s cooler than being a hacker?”

Photography by Greg Khan